"Such was the infelicity of those times, that the Greek tongue was not
taught in any of our grammar-schools; nor was there thought to be any
great need of it in the two Universities by the generality of scholars. It
is worth notice that [John] Standish, who was a bitter enemy to Erasmus,
in his declamation against him styles him _Græculus iste_; which was a
long time after the phrase for an heretic."
"But," he adds, "Dr. John Fisher ... was of another mind, and very
sensible of this imperfection, which made him desirous to learn Greek in
his declining years."
The Bishop, however, who through Erasmus was recommended to William
Latymer, one of the foremost Philhellenists of the day, could not persuade
that scholar to enter on the task, as he considered the prelate too old to
acquire the language; and Knight tells us that, in order to escape from
the application, he advised Fisher to send for a professor out of Italy.
Englishmen, even at a later period than this, occasionally went to
Florence or elsewhere to learn Greek; but Erasmus made himself, with the
assistance of Linacre, tolerably proficient in it, on the contrary, during
his first visit to England in the time of Henry the Seventh (1497-8), and
was sufficiently versed, at all events in the rudiments, to give lessons
to others while he remained at Cambridge. Doubtless he did so in aid of
his expenses.
"In Cambridge," observes Knight, "Erasmus was the first who taught the
Greek grammar. And so very low was the state of learning in that
University, that (as he tells a friend) about the year 1485, the beginning
of Henry the Seventh's reign, there was nothing taught in that public
seminary besides Alexander's _Parva Logicalia_ (as they called them), the
old axioms of Aristotle, and the questions of John Scotus."
Erasmus himself was for some time Greek Reader at Cambridge, and was
contemporary there with Richard Croke, of King's College, who did valuable
service in promoting the cause of classical learning at that University,
and published several tracts relating to the Greek literature and tongue,
including _Introductiones ad Linguam Græcam_ and _Elementa Grammaticæ
Græcæ_--the earliest attempts to place before students in a handy form the
alphabet of the subject.
At Oxford it was an Italian, Cornelius Vitellius, who became the first
Greek professor, and William Grocyne, who with Latymer and Linacre was the
earliest Greek scholar in England, was among his pupils.
It is to be suspected that, while a man of genius like Erasmus could
scarcely have failed to make something of whatever he seriously undertook,
his conversance with Greek was always comparatively superficial, and it is
merely an additional piece of evidence how little the language was
cultivated at Cambridge at that epoch, that he was enabled to earn money
as a teacher of it.
It was not apparently till 1524 that Greek type was introduced into our
printing-offices. Linacre's book _De Emendata Structura Latini Sermonis_,
published in that year, is generally received as containing the first
specimen found in any production of the English press. The Greek alphabet
occurs in the Primer of 1548.
II. Florence, Rome, Padua, and Rhodes were four great centres whither
foreigners were then accustomed to resort for the study and mastery of
Greek. In the _Life of Dean Colet_ it is shown how he travelled in Italy,
and met with two of his countrymen at Florence, Grocyn and Linacre, and
with a third at Rome, Lily, afterwards the famous grammarian, who, after
learning Greek at Rhodes, had proceeded to Rome to render himself equally
adept in Latin, so that, when he finally settled in London, he had served
a laborious apprenticeship and taken unusual pains to become an instructor
of others.
Colet himself, it is to be noted, displayed in earlier life a bent
towards theology and the Fathers, though he had scanty sympathy with the
survivals whom he found around him, both at home and abroad, of the
monastic schoolmen and expounders of the old divinity.
"He had observed these schoolmen," says his biographer indeed, "to be a
heavy set of formal fellows, that might pretend to anything rather than to
wit and sense, for to argue so elaborately about the opinions and the very
words of other men: to snarl in perpetual objections, and to distinguish
and divide into a thousand niceties: this was rather the work of a poor
and barren invention than anything else."
Knight preserves a rather diverting anecdote of a preacher who spoke in
his sermon before Henry VIII. against the Greek tongue, and of a
conference which Henry caused to be arranged after the discourse, at which
in his presence the divine and More should take opposite sides, the former
attacking, and the latter vindicating, the language. More did his part,
but the other fell down on his knees and begged the King's pardon,
alleging that what he did was by the impulse of the Spirit. "Not the
spirit of Christ," says the King to him, "but the spirit of infatuation."
His majesty then asked him whether he had read anything of Erasmus, whom
he assailed from the pulpit. He said "No." "Why then," says the King, "you
are a very foolish fellow to censure what you never read." "I have read,"
says he, "something they call _Moria_." "Yes," says Richard Pace, "may it
please your highness, such a subject is fit for such a reader."
The end of it was that the preacher declared himself on reflection more
reconciled to the Greek, because it was derived from the Hebrew, and that
Henry dispensed with his further attendance upon the Court.
The feeling and taste for Greek culture which Lily, Erasmus, and others
had introduced and encouraged, were promoted by the exertions of Sir John
Cheke and Sir Thomas Smith at Cambridge, and by Dr. Kay or Caius; and a
controversy, almost amounting to a quarrel, which Cheke had with Bishop
Gardiner on Greek pronunciation, stimulated the movement by attracting
public attention to the matter, and bringing into notice many Greek
authors whose works had not hitherto been read.
The literary contest between Cheke and Gardiner was printed abroad in
1555, and only eleven years later a paraphrase of the _Phoenissæ_ of
Euripides by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh was performed at
Gray's Inn.
III. The tract published by the learned John Kay in 1574 on the
pronunciation of Greek and Latin is rather pertinent to the present
movement for varying the old fashion in this respect. Kay instances the
cases of substituting _olli_ for _illi_, _queis_ for _quibus_, _mareito_
for _marito_, _maxumè_ for _maximè_; and in Greek words, the ancients,
says he, certainly said _Achilles_, _Tydes_, _Theses_, and _Ulisses_, not,
as people sometimes now do, _Achillews_, _Tudews_, _Thesews_, and
_Ulussews_. The author likewise refers to the employment of the aspirate
in orthography, as in _hydropisis_, _thermæ_, _Bathonia_, and _Hybernia_,
which used to be read _ydropisis_, _termæ_, _Batonia_, and _Ivernia_. He
was clearly no advocate for the latter-day mode in England of hardening
the _g_ and the _c_ as in _Regina_ and _Cicero_.
But the fact is that, where there are no positive _data_ for fixing the
standard or laying down any general principle, there can never be an end
of the conflicting views and theories on this subject, and the best of
them amount to little more than guess-work.
The modes of pronouncing both the Greek and Latin languages have always
probably varied, as they do yet, in different countries; and the Scots
adhere to the Continental fashion as regards, at all events, the latter.
Experience and practical observation seem to shew that every locality has
a tendency to adapt its rules for sounding the dead tongues to those in
force for sounding its current vocabulary; as a Roumanian lad, for
instance, in learning Latin, will instinctively follow his native
associations in giving utterance to diphthongs, vowels, and compound
words. The Greek language, in respect to this point of view, occupies an
anomalous position, because it enjoys a partial survivorship in the
Neo-Hellenic dialect; and it has been natural to seek in the method
employed by their modern representatives and descendants a key to that
employed by the inhabitants of ancient Hellas in pronouncing words and
particles, and, in short, to the grammatical laws by which their speech
was regulated.
It appears, however, that philologists have been disappointed in the
results of this test, as the differences between the two idioms are often
so wide and material. Yet, nevertheless, a Greek of the nineteenth century
must be allowed to be a rather important witness in taking evidence on
such a question, as the whole strength of received tradition and a _primâ
facie_ argument are on his side; and when we find that he gives to the
long E or [Greek: êta] the force of A, and to the diphthong [Greek: oi]
that of E, we grow somewhat sceptical as to our right to impose on those
particles a different function, especially seeing that the Ionic dialect
and the metrical arrangement of the _Iliad_ ostensibly support this
interchange of phonetic values. I need scarcely advert to the favourite
theory that, so far as the Greek long E is concerned, it had its source in
the vocal intonation of the sheep, which is, after all, far from an
invariable standard.
The Englishman, in dealing with such themes as foreign spelling and
pronunciation, treads upon eggs, so to speak, as he lives within the
knowledge of the whole world in a glass house of his own.
IV. But scarcely any books in the Greek character were printed in England
until Edward Grant, head-master of Westminster School, brought out his
_Græcæ Linguæ Spicilegium_, or Greek Delectus, in 1575. It saw only a
single edition, and is still a common book, not having been apparently
successful; and the next attempt of the kind did not even appeal to the
English student, though the work of a native of North Britain; for
Alexander Scot published his _Universa Grammatica Græca_ at Lyons in a
shape calculated to invite a yet more limited circulation than the essay
of Grant.
Perhaps one of the earliest English publications relative to the study of
Greek poetry was the _Progymnasma Scholasticum_ of John Stockwood,
published in 1596. Stockwood had been master of Tonbridge School, a
foundation established by the Skinners' Company, and while he was there
brought out one or two professional works. This was avowedly taken from
the _Anthology_ of Stephanus, and presents a Greek-Latin interlinear text.
Again, in 1631, William Burton, the Leicestershire historian, and a
schoolmaster by profession, delivered at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, an
oration on the origin and progress of Greek, which many years later, when
he had charge of the school at Kingston-on-Thames, was edited by Gerard
Langbaine. It was a scholarly thesis, and of no educational significance,
except that it exhibited the survival of some languid interest in the
topic at the University.
Very few Greek authors found early translators here beyond the selections
prepared for schools; but it is remarkable that the example in this way
was set by a citizen of London, and a member of the Goldsmiths' Company,
Thomas Niccols, who in 1550, at the instance of Sir John Cheke, undertook
to put into English the History of Thucydides. This was almost a century
before the version by Hobbes of Malmesbury.
The partial translation of the _Iliad_ by Arthur Hall of Grantham, 1581,
was taken from the French. But Chapman accomplished the feat of rendering
the whole of Homer, as well as the _Georgics_ of Hesiod and the Neo-Greek
_Hero and Leander_. At a later date, Thomas Grantham, a schoolmaster in
Lothbury, who seems to have been in a state of perpetual warfare with his
critics as to the merits of his fashion of teaching, brought out at his
own expense, and possibly for the use of his own pupils, the first,
second, and third books of the _Iliad_.
The grand work of Herodotus was approached in 1584 by an anonymous writer,
who completed only _Clio_ and _Euterpe_.
But these intermittent and isolated cases shew how languid the feeling for
Hellenic literature and history long remained in England; nor, when we
regard the unsatisfactory character of the translations from the Greek,
with rare exceptions, down to the present day, is it hard to see that the
want was at least as largely due to incapacity on the part of scholars as
to indifference on that of the public.
Many of the schools employed a small elementary selection from the Greek
writers, of which a fifth edition was printed in 1771.
When Charles Lamb was at the Blue Coat School (1782-9), the Greek authors
read there appear to have been Lucian and Xenophon, the former in a
Selection from the _Dialogues_. The present writer, who was at Merchant
Taylors' School from 1842 to 1850, used Xenophon, Homer, Euripides,
Sophocles, and some volume of _Analecta_. When the school was founded in
1561, it was difficult to find a boy to read Greek; but in the following
century it enters rather prominently into the prospectus on
Examination-day.
All the great seminaries differ in their lists; the choice depends on the
personal taste of the masters from time to time; and there is a certain
virtue in traditional names.
But the truth is that in England, after all, although this language has
continued to be taught in all schools of any standing or pretension, the
critical study and genuine appreciation of it have always been confined to
a narrow circle of scholars; and nowadays there is a growing tendency to
prefer the living languages, as they are called, to the dead.